About this Course

Persisting data is a core skill for any iOS developer. This course will teach you three techniques for storing data to your device’s hard drive: NSUserPreferences for small amounts of data, the Sandbox for files and Core Data when you have to play in the Big Leagues!

Course Cost

Free

Timeline

Approx. 2 months

Skill Level

Advanced

Included in Course

Rich Learning Content

Interactive Quizzes

Taught by Industry Pros

Self-Paced Learning

Student Support Community

Join the Path to Greatness

This free course is your first step towards a new career with the Become an iOS Developer Nanodegree Program.

The course also assumes basic familiarity with git. Specifically, you will need to be able to clone git repositories and checkout branches specific to each lesson. How to Use Git & GitHub is a great option if you need to brush up on these skills.

You will need access to a Mac computer running OS X 10.9 or later. However, you do not need an iPad or iPhone to complete the activities. All exercises can be completed using the iOS simulator built into Xcode.

Why Take This Course

Just like computers, your iPhone has two types of memory: main memory (RAM) and the hard drive. In all the apps you’ve written, you’ve interacted with RAM, but this memory is limited, and it’s important that the apps you design use it as efficiently as possible. To use the RAM efficiently it is important to be able to store data on the hard drive.

It is also important for your apps to maintain state when they are turned off. The apps you’ve built probably aren’t persistent, meaning that they don’t save their state to the device’s hard drive. As RAM is volatile, data is lost when the app stops running. In this course, you’ll learn how to persist the state of the device using NSUserDefaults and Core Data.